While I'm afraid I don't have any helpful advice, I would dearly love a copy of that save before you reload / alter it. It sounds like a wonderful joke to play on my friends. ;-)
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Ben BlankAug 15 '11 at 17:31

I actually reverted to a previous save file, as it was easily less effort than any hacking solution. Making your own shouldn't be hard though :-)
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fredley♦Aug 15 '11 at 18:39

12

I was relieved when I understood that the question is on the Gaming site and not something like Home Improvement.
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MalcolmAug 15 '11 at 19:04

4 Answers
4

If you open your world with MCEdit, you can select the area containing the TNT and use the “Delete Entities” operation to delete all the activated TNT in that area. (Note that Delete Entities will also remove any minecarts, boats, and wolves in the selection. MCEdit will show entities as transparent red blocks, but not what type of entity they are.)

Without such editing, by the physics of Minecraft, there is no way to stop activated TNT. However, you can prevent the explosion from having any effects on other blocks, including other TNT, by dumping water in the space where it will explode. (This probably can't help you fast enough unless you have a full bucket on your hotbar already.)

Hitting Alt+F4 would have been the wiser choice because by hitting Escape you invoked the game to save your world.

Alternatively you can quit the game, then delete (and backup) your level.dat and rename your level.dat_old to level.dat. The problem is that you don't know from when the *level.dat_old* is. I just know that this saved my house from burning it down accidentally and the game was set back about 10 minutes.

I would not expect reverting level.dat to have any effect. level.dat stores your location, inventory, and world seed, but does not store the world chunks itself (which are what contains the TNT).
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Kevin ReidAug 15 '11 at 21:41

I'm against just quitting without triggering the world save. I have a feeling there might be a chance of corrupting your saved world files.
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Denilson SáAug 16 '11 at 7:41

That is true, you should never trust this method completely. ;)
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ExaAug 16 '11 at 8:02

If you encase it in obsidian it will prevent the explosion going outward, encase it in water and it stops the damage that the surrounding blocks receive. I'd recommend worldguard because it can prevent the ignition of TNT.

There is really not too much you can do, besides "hacking", installing mods or made your structor out of a really hard material. Encasing TNT in water and igniting it will cause no damage to any surrounding blocks or other TNT.
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alexy13Aug 15 '11 at 12:05

Just thought I'd answer with one more solution: if you have Single Player Commands installed, you can use the /defuse all command to remove all the TNT that is activated. The TNT blocks will disappear (since after activation, they are considered entities and not blocks), but each previously activated block will drop a TNT item in its place for you to pick up.

This is a nice solution because Single Player Commands pauses the game when you bring up the console with T, so you don't need to frantically type the command before it goes off.